Gustav Mahler’s Symphonic Landscapes by Thomas Allan Peattie (review)

Though Gustav Mahler’s symphonies were created near the end of the “long” nineteenth century, and in many ways self-reflexively comment on the classical– romantic musical tradition, they continue to hold a central position in the orchestral repertoire and in many listeners’ musical imaginations. Scholars are increasingly occupied with interpretive approaches to the composer’s music, extending the foundational investigations into biography and creative process. A special challenge in this work, as witnessed in books such as Raymond Knapp’s Symphonic Metamorphoses: Subjectivity and Alienation in Mahler’s Re-Cycled Songs (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003) and Julian Johnson’s Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), and building on the seminal example of Theodor W. Adorno’s 1960 Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (trans. Edmund Jephcott [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992]), is how to grapple with Mahler’s copious intertextuality, and the ways in which he juxtaposed manifold elements and disrupted musical processes rather than subsuming such seams within the musical fabric. In Gustav Mahler’s Symphonic Landscapes, Thomas Peattie cites these authors often, and constructs his own framework for understanding the ways in which Mahler reinvented the genre of the symphony through a “radical approach to the presentation and ordering of musical events” (p. 7).

Peattie outlines three “thematic anchors” in his introductory essay, “Hearing Mahler,” each of which aims to capture aspects of Mahler’s music that are at once difficult to grasp yet somehow immediately palpable, and to connect the music to Mahler’s cultural context. Depictions of “landscape” are notable in many of the symphonies, for instance, and they are also, through the perspective of train travelers across Europe in the later nineteenth century, a “principal site of modernity.” “Mobility” is similarly “emblematic . . . of both transatlantic and metropolitan modernism,” and metaphorically related to Mahler’s frequent “mobile spatial deployment” of instruments in (and located outside of) the orchestra (p. 8). The notion of “theatricality” captures numerous gestures in Mahler’s music as well as aspects of politics and culture during the Viennese fin de siècle (p. 9).

Chapter 1, “The Expansion of Symphonic Space,” uses the early cantata Das klagende Lied and the First Symphony to explore tensions between theatrical gestures in opera and their use in conventionally “abstract” genres of music, such as the symphony. Peattie cleverly links the careful placement of offstage instruments in Mahler to distinctive uses of offstage instruments in Beethoven’s Fidelio and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, for example, describing the phenomenon as creating “works that tend towards opera, but opera that has been, so to speak, purified of any outer action” (p. 41). He also explores an 1895 attempt Mahler made, in his role as conductor, to place offstage the “Turkish march” passage of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony finale. Peattie argues that through passages like these Mahler was attempting to reestablish the vitality of the symphony at a time when the genre’s influence was on the wane. His analysis extends recent discourse in the field that foregrounds nuances of genre, which have tended to be marginalized in favor of formal structures. Most fascinating are the ways Peattie shows that Mahler is not using offstage instruments as static planes of sound, but rather setting the instruments in motion through provocative notations in the score, and indeed, he posits “mobility” as a “guiding metaphor” for understanding Mahler’s approach to the symphony (p. 46).

Peattie shows in chapter 2, “Distant Music,” that Mahler is not only concerned with the literal use of offstage space, but, intriguingly, also with the “illusion of distant sound” created by onstage instruments (p. 50). While most commentators search for programmatic explanations for these passages, such episodic structures may be better conceived as juxtapositions of unrelated tableaux. Using the Third Symphony as his main example, Peattie reworks the standard notion of romantic “distance,” showing how Mahler...